Every museum or exhibit I go to about the Easter Rising and Irish history furthers my realization of how real all of this was, how all of these men and women were actually individual people and the extent to which they suffered and died for their cause. No place has done that more than my trip to Kilmainham Gaol today. It's one thing to read about these people were jailed and executed, but it's something very different to stand in the place where it actually happened.
I ended up developing a closer connection to my assigned Easter Rising figure, Grace Gifford Plunkett, than I thought I would. Though the most famous part of her story is the circumstances of her marriage, that was only one part of her life as a revolutionary. What resonated with me was her passion for art, and her motivation to use her art to promote the ideas she was passionate about. In 1923 Grace was imprisoned for three months in Kilmainham Jail, the same place where she was married and where her husband was killed. While she was there, she managed to gain access to paint and crayons, and created art on the walls of her cell. The one that survived enough to be restored was her painting of Madonna and Child, seen here in the picture I took today.
The more I look at it the more I wonder what was going through her mind when she painted it. One of the things I learned today is that prisoners in Kilmainham Gaol were very rarely allowed to talk, so she definitely would have had time to think. Was she just trying to keep art in her life during her imprisonment, was she tired of looking at the white walls? Does she want us to read metaphors into it, to say that she was wistful about the children she would never get to have with Joseph, that she was relating to a story of watching someone you love sacrifice themselves? I'm no art critic or historian, so I don't have any refined or revolutionary interpretations, but I try my best to think as complexly as I can about the things that warrant it.
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| A photo of the original painting before restoration |
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| Grace Plunkett's cell |
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| The chapel where Grace and Joseph were married |
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